


death and rome

by Wildehack (Tyleet)



Series: The Borgias Works [1]
Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Incest Mention, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 13:20:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10102574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “I asked for your discretion, Micheletto,” Cesare drawls, quietly enough that they are not likely to be overheard. “Not for you to take holy orders.”Shameless porn.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So this is NOT the Micheletto/Cesare companion fic to the heart, poor old wound. This is an actual PWP, and totally different. 
> 
> The origin story: I was going to tidy up a tiny prompt fill for preservation on ao3, and then it spiraled into porn. I never write porn. But Micheletto/Cesare, with their platonic yet erotic whipping and their sexy murder-weapon demonstrations and their relationship drama played out with spies and murder and the dagger Pascal pretended was Micheletto's dick just a few scenes earlier being pressed to Micheletto's chest while he offers Cesare the hilt in order to kill him/penetrate his heart, um. Well. They deserve more porn, guys. They just do.
> 
> Thanks to @dignifiedrice for talking this through with me even though she has no idea who the Borgias are, and thanks to @marmolita for always being down to talk Borgias, and for being the one person besides myself who I am fairly confident would also appreciate some Cesare/Micheletto porn. 
> 
> This goes AU in whatever episode Pascal is introduced in.

Micheletto fucks a boy in Milan.  
  
It is a stupid risk, but he takes it anyway, follows a smiling boy out from under his lord’s nose to an abandoned palace. What is he alive for, except for stupid risks like these? If he had wanted a safe life, he could have stayed in Forlí, and married Violetta the miller’s daughter. Instead he chose death and Rome and the sharp thrill of a hard body yielding beneath him.   
  
It is a very pleasant interlude. The boy is a sweet, fine thing-–finer than anything meant for gutter trash like him. He is unsettlingly tender, and Micheletto has to restrain himself from responding in kind, matching soft touch for soft touch. He allows the boy one kiss after they both come off, and does not let himself linger.   
  
He returns seamlessly to his lord’s side when the pleasure is done, confident that the spoils of Milan have occupied his lord's attention for the afternoon. His lord indeed takes up temporary residence in Ludovico Sforza's chambers, his retinue amusing themselves with the abandoned finery of the palace.   
  
That evening, after the others have left his lord to his maps and a bottle of Sforza wine, Cesare asks him what he discovered that afternoon. Micheletto dutifully reports of the curiosities of da Vinci's workshop--he thinks his lord will be interested in the pistol sight, if nothing else--and Cesare listens to him quietly for a while, sipping at a red goblet of wine. When Micheletto finishes, Cesare is silent for a breath, and then abruptly he says: "You fucked that boy." It isn't a question.   
  
Micheletto freezes, utter dread and a strange, savage relief flooding him in dual measure. He has feared exactly this for so many years, and now it has happened. His lord knows the truth of him. There is nothing left to fear. He unbuckles his dagger and drops to his knees before his lord, pressing the point to his heart. “Kill me quickly,” he manages, offering Cesare the hilt. “Please.”   
  
A hand joins his on the dagger’s hilt, Cesare’s fingers brushing his, and then Cesare is drawing it away from him, setting the blade aside. “There will be no killing,” his lord says quietly. “God’s wounds, Micheletto. Did you think I did not know?”   
  
Micheletto raises his head sharply, and finds Cesare looking at him with the concentration he usually reserves for matters of state, or his sister's happiness. His voice, when he can bring himself to speak, is hoarse. “You knew. How long have you known?”   
  
Cesare shrugs, but doesn’t break their eye contact. “How long have you been in my service?”   
  
Micheletto has trained himself too well to move, but he feels that like a blow. All these years. All the care, all the terror, and for nothing. “My lord wanted to know about the boy,” he says stupidly.   
  
“Mm,” Cesare agrees. “I marked him. Machiavelli did, too. You must take greater care.”   
  
The only answer Micheletto can make to that is a nod, stiff and humiliated.   
  
Cesare tilts his head to the side, curiosity filling his face. “You will not see him again.” It isn’t a command, but it also is not a question. Micheletto shakes his head anyway. “And you have no lover in Rome.”   
  
“Love is not–-for men like me,” Micheletto manages.   
  
“Oh?” Cesare asks, his voice light. “So you do not love me?”   
  
He can make no answer to that, his tongue gone dry in his mouth. He is suddenly very conscious that he is still on his knees.   
  
Cesare smiles at him. He sounds amused, but his eyes are sharp. “Either you know or you don’t.”   
  
Micheletto finds his voice at last, swallowing hard. “I would need a heart for that, my lord.”   
  
“Ah,” his lord says, drawing the word out, softly mocking. “Of course. I had forgotten.”  

*  
  
Micheletto does not bed anyone for months after they return to Rome. He cannot bring himself to so much as glance in the direction of the streets where he knows amenable men live. He has never fucked anyone who knows of his position in the Vatican. He has never fucked anyone his lord might set eyes on, even accidentally. There is a butcher in the lower town, a merchant who comes to the city only every six months, a smiling stable boy at a cheap tavern. There are other places he could go, of course. There are always places for men like him. But the flood of humiliation that accompanies his desire these days leaves him cold, keeps him silent and tight-jawed at his lord’s side.

Cesare notices, of course. He is more convinced than ever that his lord notices everything.  
  
They are returning from a midnight venture in the lower town, striding just past the street where the butcher lives, when his lord chooses to comment.

“I asked for your discretion, Micheletto,” Cesare drawls, quietly enough that they are not likely to be overheard. “Not for you to take holy orders.”  
  
“I am no priest,” Micheletto says, unable to stop his spine going rigid.  
  
“No,” Cesare says, smiling. “But you have shown more restraint in the last few months than the whole of the curia.”  
  
Micheletto shrugs carefully. “The curia do not often restrain themselves.”  
  
“And you do?” Cesare asks, raising one dark eyebrow.  
  
Micheletto thinks again of Forlí, of Violetta’s childbearing hips, of the first man he ever loved grimly digging his own grave, hammering nails into the wood of his own coffin. He decided years ago that he would punish the world instead of himself. “I do not,” he tells his lord after a long silence, and it comes out rough, almost threatening.  
  
Cesare grins at him in the dark. “Good,” he says, infuriatingly condescending.  
  
They walk in silence a short while, the familiar shapes of their city strange and shadowed by night. The old resentment Cesare stoked in him warms his chest, tenses the muscles of his scarred back.  
  
“Your bed has been empty too, of late,” Micheletto finds himself saying when the Vatican’s gates come into view, his voice low and hard. It’s true. As far as Micheletto knows, his lord has been celibate since his sister left for Naples. In his own way, on his own terms, Cesare is faithful.

Cesare does not turn to look at him. “So you mark who visits my bed?”  
  
Micheletto snorts. He has stood guard in the shadows outside Lucrezia Borgia’s chamber door more times than he can count. “Your safety is my concern,” he says, since that is true, too.

“And is my pleasure?” Cesare snaps, darting an angry glance at him.  
  
“My lord’s happiness, of course,” Micheletto replies, glad to have provoked the irritation in his lord’s voice.

Cesare stops in the street, the moonlight behind him turning him into a silhouette. An absence where a man should be. “And what would make me happy, Micheletto?” he asks, his voice dark.

The answer, of course, is razing Naples to the ground and returning his sister to the Vatican, where she would never marry again, but stay always by his side. Micheletto is not fool enough to say so. “Satisfaction,” he says instead, irritatingly aware of his heart racing in his throat.  
  
Cesare laughs. “You would have neither of us restrain ourselves,” he says, and it sounds like a judgment, or an accusation.  
  
“My lord must do as he likes,” Micheletto replies, the anger starting to ebb out of him.  
  
Cesare steps forward, and Micheletto falls into place at his side. “I will,” Cesare promises after a few paces, his voice low.  
  
Cesare goes to his rooms alone, leaving Micheletto with a sharp look in the corridor.  
  
Micheletto stares at the closed door for a few resentful breaths before seeking his own rest.  
  
*  
  
The next day, Micheletto finds the boy from Milan in the marketplace. It makes an old hurt ache in his chest—Augustino would never follow him to Rome. The boy is blue-eyed and dark-haired and all the more tempting. Micheletto pushes him into a shadowed alley, and the boy lets Micheletto shove him against the stone, arches sweetly into him. Micheletto is dimly aware that something in his chest is on the verge of yielding, or snapping.  
  
“Go back to Milan,” he orders, tearing his eyes away from the boy’s red mouth. “Do not look for me again.”  
  
He leaves the boy panting in the gutter, cursing himself for a fool. He is in a foul temper with his lord the rest of the day. Cesare allows it silently, his eyes glittering at every impertinence, and Micheletto still feels that frustrating tension in his ribcage, like his body is trying and failing to keep him whole.  
  
*  
  
His lord makes him wait almost a full week before putting him out of his misery. Micheletto tries to tell himself he expects only what he has always expected of his lord: absolute trust and absolute mastery. But Cesare keeps looking at him, lingering just a fraction too long before turning away. His lord looks at him often, of course, but now Micheletto is granted the half-curl of his lord’s mouth, the unblinking intensity of his stare. It’s the amused intensity Micheletto has only ever earned before for creative and successful cruelty: it’s the look his lord gives him before taking a prize.  
  
It is _maddening_.  
  
He has suspected his lord of a particular interest before, but not for years. In the earliest days of his service, when Cesare still beset him with tests of loyalty, there was a certain way he had smiled at Micheletto, a hungry wickedness. His lord had demanded that Micheletto demonstrate the workings of a garotte, and while Micheletto obligingly slid a cheese-cutter through a melon he was conscious of his lord’s eyes on his hands, the quickness of his lord’s breath. Cesare had pushed his thumb into the severed meat of the melon and sucked the juice away, and Micheletto had thought he understood what Cesare wanted of him.  
  
But his lord never asked, never touched him but in friendliness or anger, and Micheletto watched him very closely, and found that the catalogue of Cesare Borgia’s sins was vast and varied, but unstained by sodomy. He concluded that he had mistaken Cesare’s hunger for cruelty for something like his own desire, a nearly unforgiveable lapse.

But Cesare gives him threatening smiles and lets his eyes linger on the pulse in Micheletto’s throat and orders him to practice discretion and sodomy in the same breath. Micheletto is unsure what wrought the change—boredom, or curiosity, or the Lady Lucrezia’s departure for Naples—but his lord wants something new from him. He’s sure of it, sick with it. Wanting Cesare is an ache that’s been with him for years, a scarred-over wound that throbs in the cold and pulls at his skin, a constant tug that takes him nowhere.  
  
After a week, Micheletto receives a summons to his lord’s rooms late at night. He enters to find Cesare in the bath, frowning over a table full of letters pushed close to the basin, a carefully blank-faced servant pouring fresh water into the bath. It is not the first time he has attended Cesare thus, but he is still very aware of the candlelight playing over Cesare’s golden skin. He makes himself look steadily at his lord’s face as he makes his obeisance, right hand fisted over his heart.

“Micheletto,” his lord greets him, apparently focused on the papers. “Draw me a map of Forlí, will you? There’s parchment here.”  
  
“Does the library have a shortage of maps, my lord?” Micheletto asks, but he lifts a sheaf of parchment from the table, and takes up the single quill. Cesare knows full well that he cannot read or write, but his memory is flawless.  
  
“Draw me a map of Forlí as we saw it last,” Cesare says dryly, turning over a letter in his hands.  
  
Micheletto pulls a chair up to the other side of the table, tugs at the reaches of his memory, and painstakingly renders the Forlí they saw a year ago onto the page, complete with stores and men and beasts. Cesare continues to read as Micheletto draws, the water stirring around him. The servant boy—Niccolo, Nico, something like that—pours in a fresh kettle of steaming water, and Cesare’s skin flushes red with the heat. The boy lifts a ladle to Cesare’s hair, and Cesare sets his letter down and leans his head back, exposing the long line of his throat. Micheletto returns his attention to the map.  
  
“There,” Cesare says after another minute or so, pressing one wet finger to a line on Micheletto’s drawing. The ink smudges and pools around his fingertip, a small world rearranging itself for Cesare Borgia. “She will have fortified this in the last year, but surely the stone is weaker here?”  
  
Micheletto allows Cesare to drag him into a debate about Forlí’s fortifications that they’ve held a hundred times before, but his lord is animated and engaged, even as the boy scrubs at his broad back with a cloth.  
  
“Enough,” Cesare says after a few minutes of this, waving a hand in irritation. “Micheletto will attend me.”  
  
The boy bows, drapes the cloth over the edge of the bath, and leaves. The air in the room changes, pressing down on Micheletto’s limbs like something with physical weight. Cesare looks at him, naked and flushed in the candlelight, a mocking smile on his mouth. It’s a silent challenge; very nearly an accusation of cowardice.  
  
“What does my lord need?” Micheletto asks. His voice comes out low, but steady.  
  
“Move these,” Cesare says, tilting his chin at the desk. His eyes don’t leave Micheletto’s face.

Micheletto drags the table back to its usual place against the wall, takes the chair with it. “And now?” he asks.  
  
“A linen, Micheletto,” Cesare says with condescension, and Micheletto walks to the bath, lifts the waiting linen from its hook, easily within Cesare’s grasp. Cesare rises up out of the bath, the water sloshing around him, trickling down his skin. He steps onto the floor, barely a breath away from Micheletto, only the upheld linen between them.  
  
“Well?” Cesare says, glancing at Micheletto’s mouth before meeting his eyes again. “Dry me.”  
  
It occurs to Micheletto very distantly that he’s grateful for the orders, that in some vital and inscrutable way they’re tethering him to his body, to the growing warmth in his belly and the tight ache in his ribcage. He slides the linen over Cesare’s chest, his muscled shoulders, his stomach. “My back,” Cesare instructs, low and pleased, and Micheletto rubs the linen over the curve of Cesare’s spine, the swell of his ass. He kneels to dry Cesare’s legs unbidden, the quick hitch of Cesare’s breath making him fumble for an instant with the cloth.  
  
Cesare is hard, his prick red and perfect a few inches from Micheletto’s face.  
  
“Is there anything else my lord requires,” he asks blandly, and Cesar gives him a breathless laugh and grabs a fistful of Micheletto’s hair, forcing his head back. Micheletto drops the linen and leans slightly into Cesare’s hand, finds Cesare still smiling. The hand in his hair pushes him forward, and Micheletto wraps his hands around Cesare’s thighs and takes his lord’s prick into his mouth.  
  
He’s good at this. He’s had years to practice, has done this in the pursuit of his duties as well as secretly, for pleasure. It’s different with Cesare’s prick bumping against his soft palate, Cesare’s hard belly twitching with his uneven breath, Cesare sliding his free hand down to cup Micheletto’s jaw, thumb stroking roughly at Micheletto’s cheekbone. He feels a boneless shadow of the relief he’d felt when Cesare told him he knew, a wild resignation. He’s wanted this for so long, and now the want and the restraint and the hope are no longer his concern; now the entire matter is caught in Cesare’s hands, Cesare’s to do with entirely as he chooses. He looses a small sound of relief at the thought, and Cesare groans, his fist tightening reflexively in Micheletto’s hair.  
  
He repeats the sound and is rewarded with the slightest jerk of Cesare’s hips, and before Micheletto finds himself moaning like a whore around his lord’s prick, Cesare is urging him up by his hair. As soon as Micheletto gets to his feet Cesare pushes him towards the bed, his eyes dark, mouth bitten and red.  
  
Micheletto goes, yanking off his boots, and Cesare follows behind him, not waiting for Micheletto to finish fumbling with the straps of his tunic before he bends him over the edge of the bed. Micheletto can’t quite get enough air, and he wants to grind against the mattress but his lord is behind him so he arches into Cesare’s body instead. It’s obscene, really—that Cesare is naked and still mostly wet, pressed up against his fully clothed body, and something about not being able to see him and not having a task makes him tense, unable to sink into the relief of it.  
  
Cesare puts a hand on the back of Micheletto’s neck and shoves him down into the mattress, kicks Micheletto’s clothed thighs apart, traps him against the bed, wet hair dripping onto Micheletto’s shoulder. “Is this what you wanted,” Cesare asks in his ear.  
  
Micheletto means to say yes, but somehow what comes out of his abused throat, rough and too-honest, is “You can do whatever you want to me.”  
  
Cesare laughs. “I know,” he says, comfortable in the knowledge that Micheletto is _his_ , that he’d kill for him, die for him, _anything_ , and Micheletto shudders, biting down hard on the inside of his own cheek.

“Get rid of these,” Cesare says, plucking at the leather waist of Micheletto’s breeches, and gives Micheletto just enough space that he can untie them one handed, sucking in useless breaths against the mattress. Cesare helps him shove them off, and then spits into his palm.  
  
“Eminence,” Micheletto begins hoarsely, not knowing how the sentence will end, and before he works it out, Cesare is pushing a finger inside him.  
  
“I’m not eminent anymore,” Cesare reminds him, and drops an amused kiss onto Micheletto’s shoulder. It’s the softest touch Cesare has ever given him, and Micheletto lets out a sharp huff of air and jerks his hips against the bed. His untouched prick is heavy and aching; the last time he was this desperate was with Augustino, when he was young and in love.  
  
“You don’t—“ he begins, panting when Cesare works in another finger. “Don’t need to be—gentle.”

He can hear the grin in Cesare’s voice. “I thought I could do whatever I wanted.” His fingers twist, and Micheletto flinches into him.  
  
“You can,” Micheletto promises, stupid and split open, a world making way for Cesare Borgia.

Cesare is not gentle when he fucks him, and Micheletto is pathetically grateful, the air punched out of his lungs with every thrust. When Micheletto tries to brace himself with one arm and steal a hand down to his prick, Cesare grabs his wrist. “Come off when I tell you,” he orders, pressing Micheletto’s palm into the bed. “Not before.”  
  
Micheletto nods, eyes squeezed shut, and breathes through it until Cesare lets out a choked sound that Micheletto will remember until he dies and shudders against him, pressing his open mouth to the back of Micheletto’s neck.

“Enough,” Cesare murmurs after a small eternity, and pushes him onto his back. “Bring yourself off,” he instructs, languorous and warm against him, and Micheletto reaches gladly for his own prick.  
  
Cesare looks at him while Micheletto strokes feverishly at himself, still with that mocking edge. “Are you sure you don’t love me,” Cesare asks thoughtfully when Micheletto is on the edge of spilling. He doesn’t wait for an answer, but leans in and kisses him. His hand cups Micheletto’s jaw with deliberate and agonizing tenderness, exactly like he loves him. The cruelty is breathtaking, but the kiss is sweet as anything, sweet as Lucrezia Borgia, as sweet as the boy from Milan. Micheletto sobs into Cesare’s mouth and comes off into his own hand, shaking with the strength of it.  
  
Micheletto is still shivering with the aftershocks when Cesare splays a possessive hand over his chest, the slight pressure his only anchor to the world. “Oh Micheletto,” Cesare sighs, palm pressed to his racing pulse, “you have a heart after all.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Always down to talk about incest and murder at wildehacked.tumblr.com. All feedback is loved. <3


End file.
